Can I Use Someone’s Album Artwork in My Article?

A question I’ve been asking myself for years

Photo by Umberto on Unsplash

You just wrote an article about that Pink Floyd album you weren’t able to put down for forty years. You put their album artwork in your article.

We have a question about that. Did you ask Pink Floyd for permission to use their artwork?

The short answer to the question of this title is that you are legally not allowed to use someone else’s copyrighted work unless you get expressed permission from them. In a job for a client, I faced a similar problem where they wanted to use a GIF from a different media company and put it in our emails, but we weren’t allowed to because the terms and conditions on their site said that we were not able to redistribute anything they made unless we got expressed permission from them.

So if you plan on using someone else’s artwork in your article, make sure to read the terms and conditions to see whether or not you can use it. If you can prove to us that you can use it because of what you found in those terms and conditions, we’ll happily publish it.

I have a silver lining though, one that can be very good for our pub at The Riff.

View this as an opportunity to write about local artists because those folks definitely want you to use their artwork and it’ll be super easy for you to get permission from them to do that.

Heck, they may even have a media kit on their site that lets pubs like us use top-quality photographs!

Connect with smaller artists that you like and ask them for permission. More than likely, they’ll say yes.

And now you are one of the first and only people to write an article about the potential next big thing in music.